save your sanity for later.

I wrote this whole thing up about what being an INFJ means to me and lost it, of course.

( Data loss is the norm around here )

I'm a bit pissed, but not strongly so, because realistically, the Meyers Briggs is a scientific crock of shit. I've been in therapy for ten years, and I can tell you that whatever article you can google up, the vast majority of the psychology community doesn't mention the MBTI, comment on it, or place any validity on its merits.

Psychologists love personality tests, but they're scientists, too. The MBTI lacks specificity and reproducibility, the quality and capacity of measuring reliably and getting the same results time after time——those two things don't happen for this "test", like Rorscarch blots and the dubiously brilliant, seemingly-semi-logical intuition-based bullshit of Freud.

That having been said, the MBTI is a great measure of something, alright, the same thing that horoscopes measure, and that is how much we believe in a specific concept about ourselves.

QED, that's why me and half of tumblr are INFJs. (Also, I'm a Scorpio with Scorpio Rising and half my houses in Scorpio, so fuck me, it pisses me off this stuff can seem accurate to the point where I'm even "the type that doesn't like types".)

---

You can probably replace INFJ with "person who thinks INFJ describes them" in all of the below, which is mainly just advice giving regardless. Even though my scientific doubts remain after spending two weeks reading about the MBTI, reading these descriptions and information likewise remain an interesting way of looking at myself from one outside perspective.

( With all of the above in mind, here are my links. )

This winter I appear to be bouncing back and forth between sane/numb erika and crazy/happy/moody erika.

Sane/numb erika are Abilify days.

Today is not an Abilify day.

When I take it, I lose my creativity, and some part of my intelligence. Maybe my curiosity... maybe something less tangible that happens when you go from being in full command of your intellectual faculties and then suddenly only have 80% control.

But I'm not crippled by overwhelming anxiety and suffering.

As I said to a friend, "it's like Sophie's fucking Choice up in here."

---

I go through. I continue. Persevere. I have learned the meaning of those words. To keep an intimate relationship, I keep more things to myself, and I have learned the value of privacy to understand the currency of communication.

Communication disseminates information and can easily lead to intimacy, and therefore is an important as hell part of the work in relationships itself.

In a fact that will surprise no one who knows my parents, the communication skills I learned growing up are largely limited to threats and control-freak manipulative behavior.

It's been a real fucking pleasure to have to learn to express needs like an adult. If I were in charge of The Force, it would be vulnerability that leads to the Dark Side, so that's been a real fucking challenge, too.

(That having been said, it's still unclear to me why I haven't been journalling. Just haven't had the time, really, I suppose. More entries, but shorter than the norm seems likely.)

Actually talking to your partner is fucking important, evidently. I would say who knew, but let's be honest, everyone but me did.

---

Esperanza. But I won't wait, while I hope. I fight, I scheme, I build, I try my best. I do it every day, and it doesn't get any easier, but at least it hasn't gotten worse. And I like the results.

Carve it on my fucking tombstone. it's not quite Dorothy Parker*, but "She always tried her best" will do.

*Wherever she went,
including here,
it was against her better judgment.

Okay, so Josh is coming over tomorrow for birthday shenanigans (thank you, thank you, but NO WELL-WISHES YET, I promise I will post ON my birthday for that, as I am very serious about my birthday)——which means it's time for cleaning calculus.

It goes like this:

What time is he supposed to get here? 5ish? Well, it might be later. Maybe. It might also be earlier. Just to be safe, I should have everything done by 3pm. What do I have to do?

Hmmm... laundry, hide some boxes of crap in my brother's room (what, he's not coming home for the weekend, this is totally legit), put out the books Josh bought me somewhere obvious, light candles, open windows, bags of cans out of the room, maybe vaccuum, close windows, pretend that my bedroom is always 20 degrees colder than the rest of the house... oh god, I'm so tired just thinking about this, blah. I should definitely go to bed by 9pm, then I can be awake by 10ish and get everything done by 3pm without rushing, and have time to take a shower, so I'm all freshened up and everything.

At this point in my thought process, my mom appears. I explain the next day's schedule to her, and she nods wisely, then says "I think you should try to have everything done by 1pm."

ARE YOU KIDDING ME HERE, LADY. By laundry above, I meant that I have to wash my clothes/towels/normal stuff AND everything on my bed from blankets to bed-linens AND my mother also thinks I need to wash the goddamn curtains—although maybe I could get away with not doing my clothes, since I have about fifty billion items of clothing—that's at least one full load of wash and 2 loads of drying, since one of my blankets takes approximately the same time to dry as A GODDAMN PAINTING, that's at least 3 hours of laundry (during which I will have to clean other things while keeping the dogs off my sheet-less bed, since that squicks me out) and that means I have to get up way earlier than 10am. Which means I have to go to bed earlier than 9pm.

Seeing as it's 11:30pm as I'm writing this, um... I have managed to fail at cleaning PRE-EMPTIVELY.

On the plus side, that means I don't have to worry so much about everything being perfect tomorrow, y/mfy? I mean, I obviously didn't give myself enough time to do a great job here, so PERHAPS not all of my towels will get washed.

Or more likely I won't do anything but I'll feel really, really guilty about it.